Canon City News

Cañon City School District mulls closing Washington Elementary School

Board faces structural problems in its schools

Washington Elementary, which was built in 1949, saw its last renovation in 2002. While all the buildings need work, Washington needs the most. (Brandon Hopper / Daily Record)

The Cañon City School Board is considering options, including closing a school, applying for a grant and introducing a bond to the ballot in 2017, to address structural problems in its schools.

In a meeting Monday night, Superintendent George Welsh presented the board potential solutions to address those issues.

In one scenario, the district would close Washington Elementary School, apply for a Building Excellent Schools Today grant and introduce a $12 million bond, "thereby increasing property taxes to that level," a slide presented at meeting said.

For the board, getting to this solution would require a long series of steps during the course of two years.

And as the district comes up with ideas for solutions, it's also trying to work around various obstacles in the maintenance funding it receives.

In order to be a good candidate for the grant, the district would have to justify using the amount of space it does. According to Welsh's presentation, Washington uses 85 percent of its building, though some teachers in the audience said it felt like more. Some other schools in the district, however, use only 65 percent of their buildings.

And if the district got the grant, the community would have to pass the bond issue to match those funds.

The board is looking at closing Washington for a variety of reasons.

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Washington Elementary, which was built in 1949, saw its last renovation in 2002. While all the buildings need work, Washington needs the most. In order to address problems, such as water dripping through a rusting ceiling and solar panels that are too heavy for the glass blocks they sit on, the district would need $3.2 million.

But while addressing those problems is one option, the board also is considering closing the school all together.

After a contracting company evaluated the school, it determined that while the school is safe for now, it won't be a few years down the road. And repairing it would cause more damage, and be more expensive, than it would be to move students to another school.

And when it comes to addressing structural concerns in other schools, Welsh said they're basic, but necessary, fixes.

"These are just the basic guts of the buildings to create a safer and more inviting learning environment," Welsh said, adding that the issues they want to address do not include items such as new furniture or technology.

In the state as a whole, Welsh said, schools receive building and maintenance funding from four places: the capital reserve fund, which allocates $300 per kid; facilities bonds, which helped build Harrison K-8; the School Finance Act; and the BEST grant.

Welsh said the Finance Act does not provide enough funding to maintain schools during the course of 30 years — many of the schools were built in the 1950s and '60s.

In 2012, the district estimated it would need $6 million to address basic structural problems in its nine buildings. But in 2016, four years later, Welsh estimated the district needs $12 million.

The increase is costs, he said, is owed largely to changes in economics and maintenance costs.

"As you can see," he said, "in the course of four years, the facilities needs have virtually doubled."

Welsh asked the board to have a plan in place by Nov. 1. During the next few months, they will go over potential solutions, including those presented at Monday's meeting.

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